Everett Maroon's Blog, page 24

Tips for Traveling Based Solely on My Last Experience

This is my second head cold in a month, so I’ve dipped into our hard-to-acquire stash of Sudafed, which I know from Breaking Bad is the item purchased by “smurfs” to make crystal meth. Thank you, AMC, for expanding my culture reference set. Based on when my left tonsil puffed up like a blowfish, I figure I was exposed to whatever virus this is on one of the three plane rides over to the East Coast. It could have been the 3-year-old two rows behind me who practiced his raspberries for 45 minutes. Or the lanky guy who slept next to me for 4 hours and insisted on sticking his feet under the seat in front of me (I thought I was the fat space hog). Maybe a flight attendant passed it to me along with my half-ounce of cracker party mix, who knows? But if I could relive the experience that day, I would do the following, and I’ll note right here that I did know these things before May 17, 2012.

1. Bring hand sanitizer with you. You may not have time to wash up in the airport rest room between flights, and you’ll probably need it more frequently than every three hours, especially if it’s during flu season. You may even be tempted to splash some on your neck, like cologne. This is not necessarily a bad idea.

2. Bring a real book. I honestly don’t believe that with all of the billions of dollars spent researching, designing, and building airplanes one little $100 cell phone is a threat and could cause a crash. But the FCC is a superstitious agency, even if it’s currently reviewing the “no electronic devices on takeoff or landing” rules. What I can believe is how many people try to eke in another ten seconds of phone conversation, ebook reading, or game app time (I’m looking at you, Alec Baldwin). What do you people think you’re achieving, a government coup? Just bring a book made of paper so you can read without getting the evil eye from the flight attendant or looking like a douche to the six people seated near you.

3. Consider how heavy your carry on item is without your roller bag. I’d shoved my laptop (7 pounds), iPad (1.5 pounds), chargers (1 pound), three books (2 pounds), and boat load of spare change, pens, and business cards (1 pound), along with my wallet and iPhone into my briefcase (approx. 13 pounds) and snapped it shut without thinking about its weight. This was no big deal when it was resting on my roller bag, but with three flights and four airports to navigate, I checked the suitcase. Now I was left dashing through O’Hare—if such a thing is possible—with an extra dozen pounds slung over my back. It’s hard for me to check my laptop or leave it at home, because I always presume I’ll be writing late at night when I’m traveling, and yet, it’s time for me to recalculate this math. I’m not the night owl I once pretended to be.

4. Don’t eat anything whackadoodle before or between plane rides. If you haven’t ventured into a plane lavatory in the last 15 years, let me just say that the only improvement implemented since then is the addition of foaming hand wash. Unless we’re talking about a 20-hour flight to Malaysia, minimize your need for the in-flight rest room. This includes passing up the suspicious sushi counter, the reuben at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant, and the dubiously warm mayo-based sandwiches at Starbucks. Nobody should have to experience gastrointestinal distress at 36,000 feet.

5. Don’t scream during flight. There are many planes in the sky at once. More than 2,000 of them are in flight over the United States right now. Occasionally they can be seen from the plane one is on, but rest assured, the air flight controllers are pretty good at keeping planes away from each other. There is no need to scream just because an aircraft is 10,000 feet away from us, especially if it’s headed away from our location. Please do not wake the slumbering people all around you because you haven’t figured out that what you can see is still miles away. Perhaps on your next vacation you should stand on the shoreline and holler that the horizon is about to attack.

Sure, I like the convenience of air travel, if convenience means that it doesn’t take me three days to go 3,000 miles. But at least on this last trip I did not get stuck on the tarmac, I did not have to wait at my destination for my checked bag to show up, I did not thump my baby’s head into the overhead compartment, and I did not get stranded in a strange city overnight. I just had to avoid all of the other dangers of travel, and I have a lovely ear infection to show for my trouble. And I’ll do it all again soon.

Across the Continent in 5 Days

I’ve got one hour until boarding time for my flight to Chicago. Flying in and out of O’Hare is always a little nerve-wracking because it’s an airport that can kick you in the teeth if you haven’t planned well or aren’t on the top of your game. I shushed my friend Barbara when she assured me everything would go well today, because I hate tempting fate. Excuse me, I mean Fate. With a capitol F.

I might as well admit to my other big airplane flying superstition: I hold my feet off the floor when we land so I can have good luck for the next flight. I guess I can’t call it “paying it forward” if it’s for my own benefit, but I will point out here I’m not completely selfish because supposedly all the other people on the flight with me would receive my good fortune as well. And I know I’m being completely ridiculous, but the little kid me heard my grandpa tell me to do it when crossing railroad tracks and landing in a plane, and now I can’t shake it for planes. I keep my feet where they are when going over tracks because 1: it makes it too hard to keep driving if I lift them up, and 2: Walla Walla has a ton of railroad crossings in and around town.

This has been a great trip, save my pangs of missingness for the wee one and Susanne. She’s been kind enough to send me pictures of him throughout the day with a video here and there so I can listen to him babble. And thank modern technology for FaceTime on the iPhone–he smiles at me across 3,000 miles and my heart leaps just as hard as when we’re together.

Since I’m being honest I will go ahead and say that these last two months have been entirely exhausting. I’m so glad my memoir is out there for people to read and discuss and digest, and I’ve mostly gotten over my feelings of guilt for marketing my work this constantly, but I still flinch when I send out yet another tweet about yet another interview or profile article. I mean, I’m grateful and thrilled that I’ve gotten so much support and yet my social network is still minuscule compared to what “real” writers have. So for those of you ready to hide or unfriend me because you’re sick of hearing about this one little book, I completely understand.

That said, I feel it in my bones when someone comes up to me smiling, telling me how much they enjoyed Bumbling or how it resonated with them. It makes me miss teaching because I loved those moments when a student would light up with the knowing of something new. These moments of connection are exactly what I’d hoped for in publishing the memoir. And I hope that they keep bubbling to the surface as more folks are exposed to Bumbling.

There was some applause during my talk at DC Trans Pride, when I brought up CeCe McDonald, when I told folks we can’t complain about LGBs leaving out the T when we bar people in our community from the T itself, and when I told the story of giving a jerk on the Metro a snappy comeback to “Are you a man or a woman?” They also seemed to like that I started off with the hokey pokey–we really needed to break the ice after a serious panel discussion on personal safety–and finished up with a call for more community building and support among ourselves. A few people stood up and clapped, and that touched me. So many people from across DC were there and damn, the District transfolk have a luxury suite in my heart, forever.

One of the current members of the DC Trans Coalition where I used to do activist work told me that they’d read my description of the meetings from 2004 and ’05, and said they’re still like that today. And so it goes, I guess.

After my keynote address, one attendee came up to me and gave me a suspicious glance. “You know,” they said (I didn’t get which pronoun I should use), “you excluded one group from the community in your talk.”

“I did?” I’d talked about who to include, sure, but I didn’t recall saying anyone shouldn’t be with us in a political coalition–since inclusion is part of my philosophy. I was curious.

“Yes, you excluded Republicans when you made a joke about Mitt Romney.”

“Ah.” I needed a second to process this, because it seemed like it needed pre-response processing.

I’d said that people needed to stick around to push for our civil rights, and not disappear into their private lives, because it was going to get funny any minute–Mitt Romney is running for President. I was just going for a little laugh, like a single grain of pepper in the big Caesar salad that was my talk. I could agree that this was exclusionary, but I don’t agree that Republicanism is a gender identity. I guess I’m okay with excluding a party or philosophy that is so set against my community.

I didn’t say this to my dissident. I thanked them for their comment and signed a book for someone.

But I acknowledge I’m certainly not perfect. Far, far from it. I want to improve my work and my message, and I crave a broader audience. I’m thrilled that Margaret Cho with 180,000 followers on Twitter would spend even one tweet on the memoir, and I still have @TheEllenShow in my sites with her 10 million followers.

So if you’ve read the book and enjoyed it and think that Ellen DeGeneres or her people should read it (or at least know about it), please send her a tweet with #BumblingintoBodyHair or @EverettMaroon in it. It won’t cost you anything but half a minute if you have a Twitter account. And it’ll be a speck of fun. I don’t hold out a lot of hope that it’ll get Ellen reading my book, but if it helps, I’ll lift my feet off the ground to give us a bit more luck.

Thanks again for all of your generosity and enthusiasm, folks. It means so much.

DC Trans Pride 2012 Keynote Address

Humor and Civil Rights

Keynote Address to 2012 DC Trans Pride

Everett Maroon

Two great tastes that go great together –Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups marketing staff.

Folks who teach about public speaking often say that you need to relay your main message to the audience three times—you tell them what you’re going to tell them, you tell them, and then you tell them what you told them. This ties in nicely to comedy writing, because threes are often the standard set up for jokes. Creative writing instructors, on the other hand, insist on a minimum of telling and a maximum of showing, usually through dialogue and character interaction. Perhaps a keynote address isn’t exactly creative writing, but old habits die hard, so I’ll try to do my telling via showing, and I’ll do it at least three times so I keep all of the public speaker people I know happy. You don’t want to piss off the Toastmasters, trust me.

So I’m going to talk about humor and civil rights in our movement. I will, after this introduction, explain what every thing in that sentence means. Well, let me define humor, civil rights, and our, right now.  By “humor,” I mean something that makes us laugh. By “our,” I mean the transsexual/transgender/trans-asterisk/genderqueer/gender non-conforming bunch of us. And by “civil rights,” I mean all the stuff that we deserve and don’t currently have, and yes, after this intro—this is still the introduction—I’ll list out what those things are, but I probably won’t exhaust everything that should be on the list because as we’ll see, I have but one perspective to bring to the movement, and as you’ll see by way of some lovely anecdotes, we need as many voices as we can scrabble together. Along the way I’ll read a few stories to satisfy the minimal showing requirement of this talk, and then I’ll finish with a self-deprecating comment to tell you what I told you. You’ll applaud, possibly because the words I strung together today were helpful and/or amusing, but more likely because I traveled more than 3,000 miles to get here and you feel pity for me that this is all I came up with in the way of a keynote. But let me thank you in advance for your excellent manners.

Delectable Reese’s products aside, humor does and should have a place in our civil rights movement. Humor is a big term, however. Almost an *cough cough TRANSGENDER* umbrella term to describe the quality of literature or speech as jovial in some way. Humor can cut the stress of a moment—something we transfolk know nothing about, I’m sure—or it can be used as sarcasm. See how I did that? I demonstrated my own example right there. Thank you again for your polite laughter. Wow, tough audience. But let us remember that some forms of humor, like satire, were designed to bring about change to dysfunctional institutions. Would anyone like to name a few dysfunctional institutions? Or you can just think about them in your head, either way. I promise there are no trick questions today.

Okay, so if we can use humor to specific ends, then maybe there’s some room for humor in our civil rights movement. Pardon me, I don’t mean to get ahead of myself. This is my first keynote. That’s obvious, isn’t it? That makes you all my test market or guinea pigs. Forget I said guinea pigs. Let’s talk about who the “our” is.

We’ve got people who identify as transsexual, people who identify only as the gender they transitioned to and most definitely NOT transsexual, transgender, genderqueer, no-gender, fluid gender, assigned gender to unknown gender, third gender, two-spirit, girl/grrl, boy/boi, people who pronounce it “bwah,” folks who want others to use a neutral pronoun, and identities I haven’t listed. If you don’t see your identity in the list, please don’t take it personally. But we want you here, in the “our.” We need you for the robustness of our community and because, hey, you’ll want to be here when it gets funny.

I admit I don’t have any patience for exclusions to this “our.” Too many of us have lived too long feeling alienated and isolated and barely present. Plus it makes it a ton harder to argue that the T is getting left out when we’re leaving out people from the T. That’s called a contradiction in my book. My proverbial book, not my uh, actual book. Anyway I just adore making fun of contradictions. They’re like sitting ducks. They’re just waiting for someone to come along and point out their sittingness.

Now then, civil rights. Jesus, when did this keynote become a long list of crap? Again, my sincere apologies for wasting your time like this. But as I understand them, we’d like the following for ourselves and our community: housing, health, safety, and opportunity. Housing because hello, we’d like to get out of the rain from time to time, health that is appropriate to our needs—if I’m never going to need a prostate exam, could you please cover my PAP smears, oh health insurance overlords? I think that’s fair deal. Any breasts who come into a doctor’s office should get a proper breast exam, if those breasts want an exam, that is. Breasts, as I said in my actual and not proverbial book, have their own opinions, but being free from cancer is a human right, not a privilege or a benefit of some physician who “gets” us. I wish I didn’t have to say that personal safety is a civil right, but apparently basic concepts have gone the way of the dodo for our leaders in law enforcement and criminal justice. Or they wouldn’t prosecute someone like CeCe McDonald for surviving a hate crime and yet fail to prosecute the vast majority of individuals who assault trans people every year.

You see why we need humor? Let me map it out for all of the doubters in the room.

Number 1: We have our other bases covered. We’ve got busloads of anger over the injustices we’ve faced. We gather across the country yearly and on an ad hoc basis to mourn the people in our community that we’ve lost to violence, and trans women account for the largest group of victims among LGBT people, and are the number one reported identity victimized in ALL hate crimes. We deal with depression, frustration, and betrayal as we come to terms with who we are and as we encounter the specialists we need as transfolk—namely doctors, mental health professionals, employers, lawyers. I see you shuddering at lawyers. You’re in DC, aren’t you used to them yet? But yes, humor needs to make an appearance in all of this. Because while we absolutely need our collective anger to hold hands with our righteousness, we also need tools to help us recover and refuel our spirit when we’re exhausted. Or at least I need those things.

At least I had my hair dye debacle to thank for wearing a hat that day. As the sun beat down on the city, the stench of urine, car exhaust, and Tidal Basin funk wafted up from the sewers and asphalt of Connecticut Avenue. It gets a little hard to chant about the advantages of gayness when one is suffocating. Tourists saw us and appeared to wonder openly what the fuss was about—300 young to middle-aged, angry-looking, masculine, man-eating lesbians were walking down the street coughing, sweating and chanting. What wasn’t to admire?

We rounded the corner, the stream of lesbians chanting ahead of me to the beat of my call. I began to wonder just how long this parade route was, because we were looping around much more than the year before. I couldn’t put down my bullhorn and pony up at one of DuPont Circle’s taverns to grab a beer. Suddenly a new sensation distracted me—in addition to the heat, the stench, and my fatigued feet—my head was on fire. The vat of chemicals in my hair was activated by my now sweaty scalp. I put my hand to my temple and pulled it back. Yes, the dye was dripping down my face. So now I looked like an angry, masculine, man-eating lesbian who sweat blood. Perfect.

I held the bullhorn in one hand and attempted to wipe my brow with the other before the toxin could reach my eyes. Better the day should be awful than unbearable.

In the midst of shouting, marching, and wiping, I heard someone call out to me. We were toward the end of the parade, which I knew only because marchers had started dropping to the ground like lemmings that couldn’t quite reach the sea. I walked up to the DuPont Circle fountain, turning to the voice. It was a young transgender guy—a woman who had transitioned to a man.

“Hey, you,” he said, jogging up to me looking perfect, every short hair in place. His clothes didn’t look limp or greasy like mine did.

“Aric, how are you?” I greeted him.

“Great. I just wanted to say nice bullhorning. Is that a verb?” He laughed at himself. He was so attractive, with sturdy cheekbones and a chiseled jawline. He looked not only like he was always meant to be male, but that he’d moved the heavens to make it happen.

“It is now.”

“So I didn’t recognize you for like, half the march. I was wondering, are you GQ?”

GQ. Short form of genderqueer, describing people who didn’t identify as male or female but as something that messed with gender itself. There were 2,381 permutations of what that could look like, or so I’d heard.

I worried if I said yes, Aric and a Greek chorus would suddenly spring out of the concrete and start laughing at my ineptitude. My hand wandered to my forehead to make sure I didn’t look like a boiled beet. I said the first thing that came to mind.

“Yes, I am Gentlemen’s Quarterly.” I gave him a big, winning smile.

He shook his head and smiled. “You’re so cool. Great to see you! You coming out later tonight?” He leaned in and hugged me as he said this. He must have had our representative amounts of appeal mixed up, because I should have been the one falling over him.

“Coming out, yes, I think so!” But not the no more closeted kind of coming out, Aric, I thought. I just don’t know if I’ll ever have your confidence.

Number 2: Humor is disarming. There’s power in a well timed moment of comedy. Since I’ve covered public speaking trainers and creative writing teachers, let me also share what comedy writers say about humor: to laugh, the audience needs to feel superior to the target of the joke. That’s right, superior. Sure, there are many strategies around identifying that target, and for me, I use two over and over again. Myself, and gender. Not that I never put anyone else into focus. Before I transitioned, I caught the ire of a stranger on the Metro.

I sat down on a lightly-populated Metro train and fumbled with my iPod, though all of my friends told me, after a spate of robberies, not to listen to it on the train. I kept the sound level down so I could hear ambient noise and perhaps give my ears a break. I stopped paying attention to which stop I was at, since I knew I was in for a twenty-five-minute ride or so.

The doors opened and closed, the familiar sing-song alert sounding each time. At one stop, a man in a dirty trench coat got on. He had on what had once been nice khaki pants, now discolored and shredded at the bottom, revealing scarred ankles above worn out high-top sneakers. He looked grizzled, had stringy hair and a gray, unkempt beard. After staring at me for many minutes, he suddenly shouted: “Are you a man or a woman? Are you a man or a woman?” There was a brief pause. “Are you a MAN or a WOMAN?”

I watched as everyone on the train looked at him and then me, to see if they themselves could determine my gender. Nobody else seemed to be as angry about it as this guy. I pretended my music was much louder than it was and ignored him. Seeing my stop coming up, I stood up and stood four inches in front of the car doors, as I did usually anyway, screaming crazy man or no screaming crazy man.

The doors opened. I stepped onto the platform. I turned around and looked back toward the car.

“Are you an ASSHOLE or an IDIOT?” I shouted, and the doors closed to people applauding me and laughing at him.

Number 3: Humor is memorable. We are fighting for some very high stakes here, namely our lives. On another level we’re fighting for the soul of this country, which seems to be mired in mean-spiritedness during a time of intense need for millions of people. Right-wing pundits lambast every advance transfolk make for our civil rights, as if they have the cornerstone on morality and even as they wrestle with an Oxy habit, get caught manufacturing scandals about their enemies, or are photographed locking lips with their boyfriend in a random gay bar. One way to rise above this noise from the extremists on the right is humor. Let’s take the frequently cited male predator in a dress. This concept gets trotted out nearly every time a jurisdiction looks at changing public accommodations law—you know, to allow us to urinate in a public facility. In all states across the country, there is not a single, solitary instance of a man or trans woman, wearing a dress to sneak into a women’s rest room in order to assault her. Not one. This utter fiction comes only from the bigot’s mind, but because I love humor, let’s break it down.

“Hey uh, Jeff.”

“What Frank?”

“I have an idea.”

“Yeah? What?”

“Let’s go scare some dames.”

“Ha ha. Okay.”

“Wait, Jeff. Let’s scare ‘em while they’re peeing.”

“Uh, okay. You mean in like a ladies room?”

“Yeah. Let’s go into the ladies room and scare some dames while they’re peeing.”

“But how will we get in there?”

(Pause) “Let’s put on some dresses and go in disguise.”

“Ohhhhh. Smart, Frank.”

Fifteen minutes later.

“Gee Frank, these pantyhose are hard to walk in!”

“And these bra straps are killing my shoulders!”

“Maybe we should scare some dames the old-fashioned way, on the street corner.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Number 4: Humor is good for us. Laughing reduces the cortisone hormone that we make when we’re stressed when we laugh and releases endorphins instead that help us feel more generally happy. We also give ourselves good memories to draw upon later, form deeper emotional connections with our loved ones who laugh with us, and some scientists say that we reduce our and our friends’ social anxiety when we laugh in public. Okay, I made that last one up, but I wish it were true. It’s not impossible. You heard it here first. Look, we need to laugh. I’ve been trying to teach my 8-month-old son to laugh, and laugh a lot. I put random small objects on my head and look shocked to find them there, one second later. To an 8-month-old infant this is truly hilarious. He gets so caught up in my comic act that he’ll laugh once all I’ve done is pick up a new block or rattle, in anticipation of seeing another instance of dad being a total idiot. For adults finding the laughter can sometimes be a more challenging prospect, it’s true. But like the plastic toy on our heads, we need to find our tricks for laughing, because humor can keep us sane in a crisis and give us just what we require to make it to the next more optimistic moment.

After I’d seen the therapist Robyn a few times, she asked me outright, “Would you rather be liked, or respected?”

What kind of a question is that? I wanted to know. My brain started firing frenetically. How could anyone not want to be liked? What the hell are you talking about? Why would anyone make that choice? How could you pick respected over liked? What a crazy question! Who thinks up shitty questions like this? What are you really asking me? How could I ever answer such a ridiculous question?

I realized suddenly that I’d asked all of those things out loud. I looked down at my shoes, always my default instead of making eye contact. If I couldn’t be grounded, at least I could look at the floor.

“Liked, Robyn, liked,” I said, trying to breathe. “Why would anyone say anything else? Of course I would pick liked.” Perhaps speaking more slowly would make me sound more certain.

“Well,” she said, looking at me, “I hope that someday you answer by saying ‘respected.’”

Number 5: Humor humanizes. Whatever message we’re looking to communicate—be it borne on posterboard at an Occupy rally or into a microphone at a legislative hearing—one of the powerful effects of humor is its ability to remind the listener that we are people. We needn’t add the “just like them” line; I for one am nothing at all like Glen Beck, Ann Romney, Gary Bauer, Bill O’Reilly, or Barney Frank, for that matter. The debate about assimilationist versus outsider agendas aside, it becomes harder for people not in the trans community to rail against us when they see us as people. Like it has done for LGB people to some degree, knowing someone who is out and proud has changed the attitudes of millions of Americans on issues from anti-discrimination to parenting to marriage equality. There is no reason whatsoever that reminding others about our presence with the diversity of our faces and lives could have similar effects for our community. Humor is a key into that process of realization.

Susanne met me at the bar, taking off her winter hat and unwrapping a scarf the length of an adult boa constrictor. It took her thirty seconds to remove all of her outerwear. She’d emailed me from her parents’ house in Michigan, saying she was stuck with dialup and had just gotten my message. A quick cheery email exchange, and we’d set up this date.

“Hi, there,” she said, smiling.

“Hi, thanks for meeting me,” I said, trying to keep my smile out of the goofy nerdy range.

We got a table and were checked on often by the waitress, who didn’t have much else to do but who also seemed to find us amusing. Our pizzas arrived, hers a sausage and extra cheese, and mine a mushroom lover’s that Michael would have hissed at, given his abhorrence of fungi.

She looked at me and my pizza. “So are you a vegetarian?”

“Oh, no. I just like the mushroom pizza here.”

“Thank God,” was her response, and I laughed.

We talked about our love of Kitchen Aid mixers, and that we’d each named ours: hers was Bette, and mine, Grapey, after the official Kitchen Aid color of grape. We’d also both previously bought mixers for other people’s weddings and then wondered why we hadn’t purchased one for ourselves.

“I love baking,” I said. “I enjoy it so much I want to retire early and start my own bakery someday.”

“Shut up,” said Susanne, laughing. “That’s what I want to do!” Somehow this made sense to me, because she was currently a Ph.D. student in public policy. Who wouldn’t want to retire from that and bake cake all day?

“No kidding. That’s great.”

Things were going so well I decided to take a risk and let her know everything about my gender goings on. As soon as I started talking, I wanted to erase the decision and start over with any other topic of conversation. Hummingbirds. The state of the economy in Guam. Bloomsday parties. Monkey rectums.

“So I’ve been transitioning, taking it really slowly,” I said, feeling exposed. “Many of my friends still only know me as Jenifer, but for more and more people I’m Everett now. So you could call me either, really.” Stop talking!

The voice in my head was powerless to stop me.

“Well, that sounds like it can be hard at times,” she said.

I fought to stay on my seat and not fall onto the floor. “Yes, it can be. I’m taking things at my own pace. It’s been interesting, I guess.”

“You’re not the first person I’ve met with complicated gender,” Susanne said, looking at me. She wasn’t backing away. I didn’t know what to make of this. Maybe she was a psychopath, collecting people with gender issues in her basement and putting them in little cages so she could have her own private transsexual zoo.

Or maybe it was just okay.

The fight for our civil rights is serious, complicated. It needs to occur on the part of all of us, to whatever degree we are capable and along a multiplicity of lines of attack. We need to petition our employers when we are privileged enough to do so without losing our jobs. We need to lobby our elected leaders. We need to take issues straight to the press. We need to talk to each other, advocate for our best interests with our physicians, and stay on top of a changing, tempestuous legal system. We need to be watchdogs for each other because few outside our community have our backs. We need to make a fuss, protest, perfect our skills at insider politicking, and be ready to soothe our war-weary. To get all of this done, we need to remember that humor, comedy, laughter—our collective laughter—is a tool in our arsenal. It’s an effective means of pushing our goals forward, but it’s also an affordable means of staying alive, and better yet, of staying happily alive. Each and every one of you deserves your own “pursuit of happiness.” We have worked too hard to get where we are today to let anyone take our giggles, snark, and glee away from us.

There, I’ve told you what I’ve told you, I’ve done it by showing you, and I hope I met all of the rules for public speaking. Thank you so much for the honor and privilege of speaking today; I recognize that you’ll never get these 45 minutes back, so I hope you have no regrets in coming by and listening.

New Writing on an Old Story

Let’s say you stepped away from a project for a while–anywhere from 2 months to a year, or thereabouts–and now you’re ready to dive back in. How do you do it? It’s an intimidating prospect. The names of the characters are fuzzy, or you can’t remember which was the daughter of the failed violinist, and which has the secret dream of finding her long-lost brother. Or you’re ready to deal with and extend the main story arc, but there are two subplots that annoy you. It could be that you’re no longer in the head space to continue the original tone of the piece for that matter, but whatever the issue, the story is haunting you enough that you’re ready to sit back down and give it another chance. If the pressures of real life have made you step away and you love each and every inch of the manuscript, it’s still cumbers0me to get back into the groove. Here are some of the things I do to re-start the engine on a languishing project:

First, re-read the work, beginning to end. Every word. Keep your original character sheets handy, and jot down details about them that aren’t already in your notebook. What? You don’t write out character descriptions? Then write down the pertinent bits about them as you read, because it will help your sense of familiarity with them.

Re-map the story. Note the tone and style that you see, and draw out the story arcs. I like to use a visual diagram for these because it helps me spot patterns or deficits in the text. Are there too many scenes where people are talking and not enough action? Do I notice two characters who are too alike? Consistency errors? Transition glitches? I’ll have a decision on my hands: carve out new writing with an eye toward resolving those problems later, or fixing the issues straight away and then proceeding to the rest of the writing.

Note your thoughts and feelings as you read. Where are the bumps that take you out of the story? Invent a proofreader’s mark for “bump,” then mark it in the margins or note it in your e-reader and you can attend to those areas as you rewrite. At the end of the manuscript, take stock of the bumps—do they accumulate into some kind of larger issue, or is it just some editing that’s needed? If they’re part of a bigger problem, put that in your list of stuff to address. It could be something as simple as extra sentences that you just don’t need, or a jarring dialect you thought was brilliant six months ago (hint: dialects are almost never brilliant).

Write out what you want to shift going forward. You need to have this as a priority when you get back to writing so you don’t implant a new seam into the work—everything from before you stopped writing, and everything after. It will throw readers, so whatever shifts you ground into the manuscript need to be retroactively addressed too. If you’re changing the setting, you need to go through the text with a fine tooth comb. If you’ve consolidated two characters into one, do more than a search for the old character name. Tie up every instance of the old reality before you get rolling because you’ll learn more about what you formerly intended and this will help you place the new ideas down well.

Get another pair of eyes. Inevitably, we miss things in our own work; it’s part of how our brains work and fill in gaps. Other human beings, as they weren’t previously thinking our thoughts, don’t have this mortar hanging around as they read and they’ll be much better suited to finding the leftovers from the older version of the story. Remind them gently that the language is still rough (it is) and you’re looking for all of the spots where they stumble in reading.

Decide on your purpose, tone, storylines, and so on, and spend time working out the kinks before getting into the word-smithing. Rereading helps get you back into the story itself and your thoughts when you were writing originally. Life in the meantime has inevitably changed you (see: Pocahontas’ “You can never step in the same river twice”), so you will no longer be writing the same story as before. That’s okay. That’s good, even. But write with intention—I mean, you should write with intention in any case, but when stitching together a story from the old you and the present you, intention is even more critical. Keep attention on creating a whole novel, not a Frankenstein’s monster. Unless of course, you’re updating Mary Shelley’s masterwork.

It will come together if you give it a chance. Don’t make me list every famous book that sat around for a while before getting refashioned into something legendary.

Mother Surveillance

When Susanne and I were still trying to get pregnant, we made an appointment to see a fertility specialist in Seattle, and were told that there was new paperwork to sign because the Federal rules had changed about informed consent and patient monitoring in light of the eight pregnancies Nadya Suleman had carried to term in California. Ms. Suleman was known more popularly as “Octomom,” and derided in the media as a bad mother even before the birth of the eight children, because she wanted to birth all of them (she did also have other children at that time, but this wasn’t mentioned, in what I read back then, as the reason for questioning her parental fitness). Eight embryos didn’t magically appear in her uterus–some health practitioner had to put them there (and in fact, 12 were transferred into her). Thus while the question of malpractice or medical negligence was brought up by some of the talking heads, most of the attention was focused solely on why a woman would even want to carry and care for that many children. And although the medical board in California investigated the practitioner and subsequently revoked his license, it wasn’t he who came away with a derisive nickname.

In context, the TLC show, Jon & Kate Plus Eight was getting great ratings and later, a reality show about the Duggers, who have 19 children in Arkansas, also started on the cable channel. Yes, Ms. Suleman has courted some of this attention, gracing the cover of Star Magazine to show off her body and dole out exercise advice. But that shouldn’t absolve people from mocking her every move.

The tabloid press has never stopped questioning Ms. Suleman’s quality as a parent, blaring headlines about how much she spends on her hair to her declared bankruptcy, home foreclosure, attempts at getting her own television show, visits from Child Protective Services, and her appearance in a porn film. All of these activities are fodder for disparaging her, but it’s reached the point where even her friends have called CPS to look into her caregiving, saying that “the boys are in girls clothes and the girls in boys clothes. I can’t tell which is which.” Other details about the home environment and her choices include comments that she is “currently accepting” food stamps (quelle horreur) and that the plumbing doesn’t work (an actual concern). TMZ, classy publication that it is, even listed the amount Ms. Suleman receives in food stamps–$2,000 a month. Guess how much it would cost the State of California to put fourteen children into foster care, TMZ?

Five hundred dollars seems like a lot to pay for a haircut in any case, but it’s the unrelenting pressure on this woman and the decisions she makes that seems even more dysfunctional. Otherwise why not see more articles about great parents? It’s the perceived mental instability and sinfulness of Ms. Suleman’s behavior that keeps the press fascinated. But step aside, California cul-de-sac-dweller! There’s a new mother to admonish and ridicule! Meet Patricia Krentcil, who has helped our nation popularize another mashup term: tanorexia.

In the span of just a few weeks this New Jersey mother has gone from unknown to Saturday Night Live spoof skit. She becomes furious at the media when they stick microphones in her face. . . so of course reporters keep running up to her with electronic equipment. One entrepreneur with questionable taste has even created an over-tanned action figure in her likeness. All of this is because her 6-year-old showed up at the school nurse’s office with sun burns and said she often accompanied her mother to the tanning salon.

News shows across the cable and satellite universe caught fire reporting on Ms. Krentcil. Also over-tanned Snooki even weighed in, to which Patricia responded her comments were due to her jealousy over Krentcil’s results. Experts came out of the woodwork to discuss tanning as an addiction, and none of us should be shocked that very racialized statements about why a white woman would want to look so dark were made without an iota of self-reflection or context. Her face has been compared to a “truck tire,” “burned raisin,” “stretched leather,” and overdone toast. Surely becoming darker on purpose is a sign that she’s a bad mother, too, according to the fixated media.

Now Ms. Krentcil has been “banned” from tanning salons in New Jersey, some of which have even hung pictures of her face in their reception areas like a wanted poster. Because otherwise there would be no problem letting her in for an hour soak in the rays?

We do this, this point and laugh thing, all the time. Maybe it’s simpler to dwell on the person who looks extreme, with their extremely large stomach or overexposed skin, but these women are consuming services available to women across the country, and responding to messages about motherhood and beauty that somehow manage to go under the radar of critique. It’s not that we push women to become mothers, it’s that she wanted too many children at once (and without being married). It’s not that we create tanning salons for women to use, it’s that she goes too often. While there may be real safety issues at hand for these children—locking them in a room to get a haircut and not having working plumbing, or bringing them to a place that could endanger them with ultraviolet rays—the louder conversation here has been about ridicule and castigation.

In a context in which pregnant women are verbally abused by strangers in public who don’t agree with whatever behavior the mother-to-be is doing, Ms. Suleman and Ms. Krentcil are stark evidence that moms everywhere are under constant surveillance. Stressing out mothers seems hardly child-centered, but hey, we’re too busy pointing and laughing to notice.

Where Do We Go from Here? More Thoughts on CeCe McDonald’s Case

Now that I’ve settled down from most of my anger (trust me, there’s a lot still in here because her situation is so completely unjust), several other thoughts about what we can do as a community of gender non-conforming people have occurred to me. To paraphrase Leslie Feinberg from earlier this week, it is outstanding to see so many of us organized to support CeCe even against such massive institutions like criminal jurisprudence and the prison complex. For years now I’ve seen a small but growing voice articulating its concern about the annual Day of Remembrance–and it asks how we can come together to do proactive work in addition to mourning the violent losses of trans women and other trans-identified people. While we are outraged about CeCe’s forced “choice” to take a plea deal, we should also acknowledge that we’ve shown some measure of grassroots-created power against these corrupt systems. With collective power in mind, I humbly offer the following:

1. In your local community, organize a letter writing campaign for CeCe. Yes, people are writing letters to her now en masse. At some point in the next weeks or months, these will slow down to more of a trickle, in all likelihood. So schedule the letters among your group, so she is receiving mail not just this May but when autumn is approaching, through the holiday season, and at the anniversaries of her trial and sentencing. If we say we won’t forget CeCe, let’s set ourselves up for success on that promise. Next week I’m going to visit an LGBT youth group and I’ll bring along 50 blank cards and stamps. And markers. Dang, I love markers.

2. Call and email Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton’s office to share your unhappiness at CeCe’s situation and ask (or demand) he give her a full pardon. He’s the only one who can act at this point, since the plea bargain means there are no appeals (I’m sure someone will point out if I’m wrong). His phone numbers are:

Telephone: 651-201-3400

Toll Free: 800-657-3717

Minnesota Relay 800-627-3529

Fax: 651-797-1850

3. Form a trans civil rights group in your area, or join one if there is already one in place. Once assembled, you can do a needs assessment to get some idea of where the tensions are in your community–if it’s rural, perhaps access to appropriate health care and transition support is an issue, and if it’s urban, you may find police harassment issues, homeless shelter problems, and so on. As a former member of the DC Trans Coalition–DCTC (yes, I coined the darn acronym, so there)–we hosted a number of community meetings to identify where we should focus political pressure on our elected and appointed leaders. I recognize that this is a lot of work, but it does result in material improvements for vulnerable people. For some ideas about how to go about doing a needs assessment and strategies for advocating for anti-discrimination regulations and policies, check out their web site.

4. Familiarize yourself with the state of trans rights across the country. Yes, there are loads of articles from alternative media sources, but these vary in quality depending on the source, and often they are out of date. Google searches often load an article at the top that is from 2007 because the search terms match well; that’s not a helpful way to mine for information. But several organizations release regular or comprehensive reports on trans issues, including:

The Williams Institute at UCLA (full disclosure, my good friend Jody Herman is the lead transgender issues researcher there)
The National Center for Transgender Equality in DC
The transgender rights team at Task Force, also in DC–some of the folks from this team helped write the anti-discrimination regulations that protect transfolk who live and work in DC, which are still the most comprehensive set of regulations in the US
The Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund in New York City, focused on civil rights and protections–they release a quarterly newsletter on the latest developments of interest

5. Mentor a queer or trans youth, somehow, some way. If your local kid-mentoring group is LGBT friendly, consider joining as a mentor. Or maybe there’s an LGBT youth center or program in your area. I know this doesn’t help CeCe directly, but remember that people are coming out, on average, earlier than ever. In my experience adolescence sucked hard enough without all of this sexual orientation and gender identity crap piled on top–your weekly hour may be the most normalizing time your “little” or mentee gets. Study after study shows that at-risk youth who feel even one adult cares about them do much better in school and have much better outcomes for later success than kids with no support. If you’re not sure who runs a local mentoring group, contact GLSEN and they can help you.

6. If you have the means, donate money to a local group working on these issues. If they are registered as a non-profit with the IRS, great. If they aren’t, who cares? Every team of activists needs money for postage, or photocopying, or posterboard, whatever. Americans gave $300,000,000.00 last year to charitable causes, and 75 percent of that money came directly from individuals. Not foundations (13 percent), not estates (8 percent), not corporations (7 percent). People in a rough economy came up with more than two hundred billion dollars. We need to put some of that money behind the organizations that care about us.

7. Find like-minded individuals at your place of employment and make a list of the deficits in support that LGBT employees face. Take this list to HR, as well as some concrete strategies for remedying each issue. Sure, get the person with the most seniority or job security to front the list, or start small (“hey, how about we add gender identity or expression to our list of anti-discrimination groups?”), but it’s not impossible to get the ball rolling. No, not all employers are fair. It is my earnest wish that you find a place with more integrity soon in which to work.

8. Protest. I know, this list has been mostly about inside-the-box political strategizing. But I’ve been a Lesbian Avenger, and yes, I am a fan of the angry protester. Each avenue toward civil rights needs all of its counterparts. We can not afford to continue bickering over who has the golden ticket to the radical’s Valhalla. We need people occupying Wall Street, marching on Washington, standing outside courthouses where racial injustice is unfolding against our trans youth. And we need people working on changing laws, holding law makers accountable, and reporting on the treatment of our most vulnerable community members. Anyone who wants to learn how to eat fire, come on out to Walla Walla, Washington and I’ll teach you.

I acknowledge this is not an exhaustive list. That’s why this work is so important. It takes all of us to make a difference. But large community efforts have a solid history of changing the world.

The Bigots Are Winning

I know there’s a space between us, sometimes in the realm of sliver, and other times a reaching chasm, but it persists no matter its degree in any one moment. You have questions for me, even if you read my memoir which attempted to answer most of them. Or maybe it feels like fascination because changing your gender is “just” something you can’t get your head around.

I admit it: on a day like today, I don’t care if you can’t find a way to understand my identity, or life, or choices. On a day like today I’m enraged.

Forget rose-colored glasses. I’m wearing goggles of red, and I’ve glued them to my face.

CeCe McDonald took a plea today–41 months in prison for stabbing a drugged up, Neo-Nazi with a documented history of violence, who was chasing her down the street after she’d been assaulted by him and several of his friends. During her statement to change her plea, in which she had to recount the events of that night in June, the judge explained condescendingly how it was unlawful of her to endanger the life of her attacker.

Now there’s a concept I have trouble understanding. I fail to comprehend what the legal course of action would have been.

Bumbling into Body Hair is dedicated to two people–a young trans man I’ve mentored and Tyra Hunter, a trans woman of color who was hit by a car in DC in 1995. When the EMTs arrived on the scene, they tended to her until they realized she was a preoperative transsexual. And then they laughed at her and made jokes instead of delivering care. She died at the scene.

What has society learned since Tyra’s death? What do we do differently?

Just this week a trans woman was cited and fined for using the women’s room. Certainly peeing in the street would have also been illegal. What are her options? I have been chased out of rest rooms (men’s and women’s), yelled at, and instructed not to use them. How? I can’t will away my bladder.

Why are we okay with making transsexual people illegal? Why is this so-called Christian nation so at ease with its incessant judgment about so many people? Do I blame the Puritans? Fox News? Grover Norquist? Planned Parenthood’s eugenics roots? I can’t shake my fists in enough places.

I’m tired of being agreeable, of playing the diplomat. I’m on my reserve tank of patience for this completely unhelpful argument between transsexual separatists and people who use “transgender” as an umbrella term for all gender non-conforming people. While we squabble with each other, CeCe sits in jail for defending her very existence. Does it matter to her trial or sentence how she personally identifies? Is the injustice she faces any more palatable if she calls herself one label or another?

The bigots are winning. Our representatives argue on Capitol Hill about who should receive tax cuts and which programs for poor people they should eliminate next. And our progressive front in those hallowed halls lets those conversations continue. When Republicans take to the opinion pages to say that they themselves are the problem for the bad sentiment and gridlock in Congress, I take notice.

Billionaires feel entitled to expand their already overwhelming fortunes, in the nastiest ways possible, to boot–Koch brothers destroy unions, multi-state lobbying groups like ALEC (funded in large part from those brothers) go after voting rights and public safety regulations; rich people behind NOM spend money across the country to fuel homophobia in the guise of “protecting” marriage. And the conversation about reproductive rights has spiraled down into anger at any woman who for any reason even wants to take the Pill.

It’s not surprising to me that such rampant misogyny against nontrans women includes more misogyny against trans women. But there are other intersections of hate at play that we haven’t even begun to unpack, and judging from the Tyra Hunter and CeCe McDonald cases (not to mention the scores of other people I could mention), those intersections have dire, disastrous consequences. We are so far past the point where we need to be pushing back against these hate mongers.

I do not believe that all conversations are equal. The pro-choice and anti-choice sides are not equal. The pro-gay marriage and anti-gay marriage sides are not equal. Pushing to extend civil rights and pushing to withhold them are not equal and opposing standards. Positions have substance, and substantively, positions have material effects. We can downplay them all we want, but they persist and contribute to a national mean-spiritedness, even within our own LGBT ranks.

I do not believe that Dan Savage should have a soap box he can stand on where he gets to call Bible-thumpers “pansy asses,” and tells people that it’s the blacks who brought about Prop 8 in California when he knows it not to be true, and tells people that the very conservative Attorney General in Washington State is really a female-to-male transsexual, and OMG that’s a reason for removing him from office. We must demand principled leadership of a civil rights agenda that is not geared for assimilating us into the institutions that hate us. We must look for coalitions with our sisters and brothers in other marginalized communities—for they also have queer and trans individuals, and we as LGBT people are diverse in every way possible.

I want to ask where we go from here, how we can best help CeCe, how we respond to the death upon death of trans women and men across America, and how we can work against the stereotypes that plague us (of men in dresses and girls pretending to be men, and all the confused people “in between”). When do we get our non-discrimination act? When do we get appropriate health care and insurance? When do we get more than lip service that we are deserving of civil rights?

When do we get enough respect from society that people will stop asking us invasive questions?

When do we get to just live our lives?

All my best thoughts to you, CeCe.

Pop Culture Misconceptions About Zombies (and How They Can Kill You)

While watching Zombieland a few years ago, I was struck by the notation, made almost in passing, that in a zombie apocalypse, larger and slower people would be the first to go. Certainly I personally would not win a footrace against well, anyone, but in a zombiecalypse, I don’t need to be speedy. I just need the right equipment.

Telling fat people that they’re doomed when the undead rise is simple fatphobia that doesn’t actually serve us very well. So let me tackle this and other popular misconceptions about zombie behavior.

1. Zombies aren’t fast. It’s oh so fear-inspiring to depict them this way, but frankly, they don’t have a lot of synapses firing upstairs, so actual running is nearly impossible. But let’s say they’re ambling at a quickish pace. Put up some trip wire outside and inside your barricaded home. Now you’re both faster and more agile than most zombies, and your size need not be a factor in outrunning the postmortem.

2. Zombies can’t smell you hiding behind the windows. Homo sapiens have the worst sense of smell of all mammals on Planet Earth. Dead homo sapiens aren’t suddenly equipped with magic sniffers. Yes, they may allocate more of their olfactory nerves to locating nearby brain material, but even this is debatable. As one can imagine, zombies make lousy experiment subjects. But don’t waste precious time and energy trying to make your house smell-insulated. Duct taping oneself inside is as bad an idea now as it was when the Secretary of Homeland Security suggested it after the 2001 terrorist attack.

3. Zombies don’t run from bright light. Looks like someone got their vampires and zombies mixed up! Zombies don’t give a fig about sunlight or any other light source. They’ll trundle on along no holds barred. Don’t presume that just because we’ve seen zombies in movies cling to dusty darkness means that you’re safe from preying, groping arms in the middle of the street. Nobody is safe.

[image error]4. Zombies are like New York City—they never sleep. I laugh at any zombie depiction where they undead are curled up, snoring, and our hero goes tiptoeing past them. Hello, dead things don’t breathe, so they don’t snore, and they most definitely don’t need any shuteye. We must remain vigilant and committed to watch patrols, 24/7. The zombies never let up; we can’t, either.

5. Zombies may look pretty nice, all things considered. Popular culture would have us believe that zombies always come in decrepit, moldy packages, but remember that some zombies are recently undead. They may still have fairly clean clothing and an attractive appearance, at least until a limb or two falls off of them. As for the rest of us, when are we supposed to shower and keep up on our hygiene? We humans may look (or smell) worse than zombies, so don’t forget to use another means to determine if your best friend is really gunning for your gray matter. Asking who the current President is works pretty well.

Good luck! Remember popular culture is fun and entertaining, but when it comes to staying alive in a zombie apocalypse, it’s just garbage information. Don’t sit down and start a marathon of zombie movies to get tips on managing the onslaught.

That’s what the zombies want you to do.

Requiem for Breathing

College students, future generations of professional leaders that they are, do not have a reputation for stellar hygiene. Rather, they are known for being something of a dirty population–prone to sudden expectoration after an evening of imbibing beverages, rolling out of bed unwashed in order to make it to class on time, and giving their undergarments a second act of wearing before laundering. They are, after all, college students. They are known to be broke.

Because they have this sordid reputation, and because my wife and I both have been ourselves college students, we have something of a defense system in place to protect our offspring from the side effects of contact with dirty folks, namely, communicable disease. She accepts electronic papers from her students. I refrain from getting within two feet of any student volunteer at my agency, especially during flu season. As Emile is not yet capable of blowing his nose, our goal is to avoid upper respiratory infections whenever possible. I’m a fan of hand washing, although the skin on my hands is not.

But sometimes one hits a tipping point, and no amount nor cleverness of avoidance with viruses will prevent picking up a variant of the common cold. Susanne was the first to take ill, feeling a definite decrease in her energy level and a nagging cough. Emile and I carried on with no symptoms, so for a few days we all wondered if she was just feeling the start of pollen season.

And then, there it was, a ninja of a tickle hiding at the back of my throat, tickling me when it was inconvenient. Which I guess isn’t really the modus operandi of ninjas, but whatever. There it was, tickle, tickle. If only I could will myself not to cough. I tried, of course. I tried the cough stifle maneuver, but no go. Instead I’m pretty sure that at work and in the car, at lunch, and walking downtown I just looked like a constipated creep.

Eventually the coughing won out, and then I entered new territory—the cough-pee. Every fifth hack or so I’d realize all over again that my pelvic floor muscles need some attention. Great. I should have paid attention to that short-lived Whoopi Goldberg commercial about occasional incontinence. I’m 41 and occasionally incontinent? They don’t even make a 12-step meeting for this. Why?

Because it’s too embarrassing.

This was one cruel cold. I was reduced to a sneezing, sneeze-peeing, coughing, cough-peeing, phlegmy middle-aged man who looked like he wanted to rip the faces off of puppies. I really just wanted to be me again.

In the midst of this a student group asked me to be on a panel to discuss an AIDS and HIV documentary. Turns out it was scheduled in a chemistry lab. I wondered for the merest of moments if I could don a thick apron in case I entered a coughing fit and needed coverage, but I didn’t see any on hand. Now not only was I battling some cold that was out to humiliate me, but I’d willingly entered the lion’s den of dirty college student people.

I blamed my throat ninjas for pushing me toward self-destruction. But if I went down, I was taking them with me.

Next came the wheezing. It seemed that my lungs were capable of making a new series of noises I’d never created before, and these sounds emanated even when I wasn’t in the act of exhaling or inhaling. Several times I looked around whatever room I was in to identify what I was hearing, and then it would dawn on me that I was the noisemaker. It’s kind of like stumbling on a snoring kitten, just a light little purr that could easily be missed.

It’s hard to look serious in a meeting when kitten wheeze pops up. Not that my coworkers take me seriously, but this really moves my reputation in the wrong direction.

It’s been a week now, and the cold finally shows signs of abating. Good thing, because my bladder, throat, and lungs need a break.

Dear college students: Please shower. And wash your hands. Thank you.

My Personal Childhood Obsessions

In third grade, it was Abraham Lincoln. I adored him. I’d brave the creaky wooden step stool in my grade school’s tiny library and reach as far as I could to knock another book about him into my greedy hands, and usually I’d have read through it in one or two days. I became an annoying font of information on Abraham Lincoln and his family, and I certainly had my preferences. Mary Todd Lincoln was nearly persona non grata to me.

In context, my family ventured most summers to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for a two-week stay in a friend’s condominium. My mother instructed me with a firm shake of her index finger not to breathe a word about Lincoln while we were anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Statements like “We won the war!” said in sing-song would not be tolerated, and she feared people would respond poorly. She reminded me that I didn’t like it when people made fun of New Jersey—which was often—and the residents of South Carolina wouldn’t enjoy such mockery, either.

I kept mum, even making a pen pal with whom I would correspond throughout the winter regarding what I considered were pithy comments about parochial school in New Jersey. I was amused by my friend’s commentary on life in The South. But at some point, the wall I’d built to hide my fasci-admiration for the sixteenth President just was too much, and our friendship fizzled.

By fifth grade, I had a new target: the Titanic. There wasn’t much other than Walter Lord’s famous book on the sinking in my school library, but I had a Princeton Public Library card, so I made my way to the old book-smelling stacks and quickly memorized this section of the Dewey Decimal System. Maybe by accident or maybe idle curiosity led me to also selecting a book about the Andrea Doria, and now I was hooked on maritime disaster. I realized that all of my topics of interest were about doomed people; folks who would face insurmountable odds and well, fail to surmount them. They still had dignity, ingenuity, grace, thoughtfulness, but they couldn’t escape the predicament they faced, and I wanted to understand all of that.

I would have given my left arm to know what Thomas Andrews, shipbuilder for the Titanic, was thinking in those final hours. Was he quietly saying goodbye to the people he would soon leave behind in Ireland? Cursing J. Bruce Ismay? On the Morrow Castle, which succumbed to an intentional fire set in the writing room by a man who wanted to claim credit for putting it out (and who obviously failed), how did he reconcile his actions in the years that followed that tragedy? What pushed people to action, or inaction? Did these crises show us who these people really were inside, or is it unfair of us armchair historians to judge them in what can only be extremely stressful moments?

After reading everything I could find on the Yarmouth Castle, the Lustitania, the Empress of Ireland, and other maritime disasters, I expanded my focus into disaster in general. The 1944 Coconut Grove fire in Boston. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The Hindenburg. A fire that swept through a Chicago children’s theater in 1903, and that is the reason theaters in the United States come equipped with exit signs. I noticed patterns in these stories—greedy businesspeople who cut corners, lack of safety regulations, untested technologies that came into situations the engineers hadn’t fathomed, overloading spaces with too many people. There was so much hubris here, in these episodes. Often, there were markers of human interest stories with no real details, like the couple who fled to the Coconut Grove’s walk-in refrigerator to escape the fire and smoke, and survived. Using 1980 technology (okay, books and microfiche), I couldn’t find out any more.

These loose ends persisted in my curiosity and imagination. I’d write a story about these one-line notes, almost as if I needed to see some closure, give some details to the otherwise vague mention. This was the first time I took an interest of mine—morbid as it was—and applied it to writing. I was captivated by these people in distress. It made for rough going when a friend just wanted to play Barbies or run around the playground.

With more than 200 channels at my disposal, I now have more mayhem and emergency narrative than I can possibly consume. I could watch trial TV, or a string of Law & Order episodes, some forensic show, or a History Channel docu-thing on shipwrecks. I huff that I was preoccupied with the Titanic before Ballard found the site, and certainly before that damn movie came out. I’m busier these days so I can’t dedicate a weekend to getting lost in a book on flooded U-boats, but I do cycle through the stories I’ve read and digested, and I note that I do still tend to write about people in crisis. When I’m not writing humor, that is.

Two sides of the same coin? Can I get a maybe?